What must be understood about transferability of skills where native language acquisition is concerned is that language is acquired as part of a whole range of cognitive acquisitions that take place in the earliest stages of human development. Skills acquired from infancy, whether emotional, bonding, or motor-related, are not discarded with each successive stage of experience but rather accrue to the long-term benefit of the individual, enabling him or her to build upon the basics and add on successive layers of cognitive and motor complexity. Children first hear language sounds and, via verbal and nonverbal cues transmitted from parents, achieves native-language competency.
As the child develops physically and mentally, he or she gradually attaches meanings to the collections of sounds and the accompanying mediating actions making up the process of acquiring communication skills. Once the cognitive capacity of the child has reached meaning, a crucial pattern for making meanings can be generalized to all experience. The child continues to make meanings out of found experience, amplifying linguistic skills along the way. The linguistic skills can be said to be transferred when the language acquired in one context is applied to another context, although some residue of the original context may also be present in the new one. As Thonis puts it, apropos of the way language skills are used to operate in the learning processes of a variety of subjects: "Transfer takes place when there are elements in the new task similar to those in the task or skill previously acquired" (p. 190).
What is transferred where language development is concerned is that ability to attach meaning to new forms of verbal experience. What is important to optimal transfer is that the initial stage of attaching meaning to experience of language sounds and/or nonverbal communication cues be successful. Those sounds and the meanings attached to them can in turn even...